The Changing Landscape of Police Interviewing and Interrogation

This article reviews the research on interrogation, a practice that has been undergoing a period of reform such that the terms investigative interviewing and police interviews are now commonly used when referring to the police questioning of suspects. Tracing the evolution of practice and research, we argue that the former has been heavily influenced by the latter and a robust literature on effective and ethical approaches to suspect questioning now exists, leading to numerous reforms in the United States and abroad. Whereas the goal of interrogation had been to obtain confessions, the goal of investigative interviewing is the search for truthful, accurate, and complete information. Despite the decades of research by legal and psychological scholars, there is still much to be learned, and we conclude the review by laying out several possible avenues of future research we feel are appropriate for scholars of crime and justice to undertake.